If you’re still using Picasa as your only tool for managing your photos, it’s time to get serious about moving to Google Photos in the cloud. Picasa still works, on both Windows and Mac computers, it works today, it will work tomorrow, but you never know when there may be an update that will render it useless. If you buy a new computer, you’re going to have trouble finding the Picasa installation file because it is no longer officially available. We do have a copy of it that is available for our Geeks on Tour members, and you can probably find it elsewhere by searching for “Picasa Installation File.”

The future is in the cloud

The world of technology is all moving to the cloud. Picasa is a computer-based program, Google Photos is cloud-based. Picasa is old, Google Photos is new. If you take your pictures with a smartphone, the Google Photos app is fully automatic for uploading your photos to your Google account online and making them available to all your devices, including your computers.
But, what about all those old pictures that are still on your computer? Or the ones that you stored on external hard drives or even CDs/DVDs? If you upload them all up to your Google account in the cloud, you will then have your entire lifetime of photos available any time you look at your Google photos. I can tell you, it is thrilling when I can show someone photos of my childhood in Alaska by opening the Google Photos app on my phone and searching for Alaska. Or my wedding photos from 20 years ago, by easily scrolling back to that date. Be careful though, you may lose some friends if you do this every time you see them! But even your most photo-averse friends will appreciate it when you can instantly pull up that picture of them receiving an award 10 years ago.

Moving photos from Picasa to Google Photos

You don’t need Picasa to move your photos to the cloud – all the photos you see in Picasa are actually on your hard drive and Episode 132, mentioned above showed 2 ways of moving them from your hard drive to your Google Photos account.

The “Push” method of uploading your photos: with this method you can select a folder and all the photos in that folder as well as any sub-folders will be uploaded. It will not maintain the folder structure, no albums will be created for the folders. It just gathers all the photos from within the folders and uploads them to your Google Photos library.

If you do have Picasa, and you like the way you have your pictures in folders, you can use Picasa’s Upload command to both upload AND create corresponding albums in Google Photos.

View your folders using Picasa, make sure you have logged in to the appropriate Google account. You will see it in the upper right corner.

Select a folder (or an album) and click the Upload button. Notice that my folder name is “January” – this is not good. I might end up with lots of “January” albums and there is no such thing as nesting in Google Photos. I highly recommend renaming such folders to 2005 January, or 2005-01 or something that uniquely identifies it, before uploading to Google Photos.

Upload Options: notice when you upload with Picasa, it is set to automatically create a new Google Photos album with the same name as the folder being uploaded. In this example I learned not to name it just August, but 200608. When this is complete, all the photos in that folder in Picasa will be in your Google Photos library, AND you will have an album named 200608 with all the photos showing there.

Repeat for every folder (or album) you want uploaded to Google Photos.ORUse the Tools->Batch Upload command to simply check off all the folders or albums you want uploaded.

Using Picasa’s Batch Upload feature, you can upload many folders and albums at once

Using Backup and Sync

Backup and Sync is software for your computer that will do all the uploading for you. The problems with it are:

It uploads photos from your computer to Google Photos, but does not create albums in Google photos. The photos are just added to your library.

The default setting is to upload ALL the photos on your computer’s Desktop, Documents and Pictures. My bet is that there are lots of photos in your Documents folder, on your Desktop, and that do not belong in your Google Photos library.

After it uploads the photos, it actively synchronizes any edits or deletions. You can turn off the option to synchronize deletions, but no such option exists for edits. For example, there have been reports that once your photos are resized to “High Quality” in the online version, that resizing is synchronizing back to the computer, converting the computer originals to the compressed size. The originals are gone. This is a bug that doesn’t affect everyone and will be fixed, but why take the risk?

If you want to use Backup and Sync, my recommendation is to carefully select the folders you want it to upload. You can select a parent folder and it will upload all photos in any subfolders. So, for example, you could tell Backup and Sync to upload the My Pictures folder, and it will get all the photos within the My Pictures folder structure. Don’t accept the defaults that are to upload all the photos on your entire computer. Then, when the upload is complete, I recommend discontinuing the use of Backup and Sync. From now on, use the “Push” or “Pull” manual techniques above to add miscellaneous sets of photos from your computer to Google Photos. This way, you’re confident that whatever is on your computer is independent, safe, not being synced.
If you are a Google Drive user, that’s a whole different aspect of Backup and Sync. You can set it to synchronize your entire Google Photos library back down to your computer. That will be another lesson!

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

“I’m going on a 3 week cruise starting tomorrow and I’m afraid my phone will run out of space for taking photos.”

Don’t let that happen to you! And, don’t delete photos off your phone without making sure they’re backed up first!

We got together with our friends, Chris and Charles, the evening before they were to board a cruise ship for 3 weeks. I looked at Chris’ phone and saw that she only had a few hundred megabytes of free space on her phone. At that rate, she wouldn’t last one day of taking pictures before getting the dreaded, “Device Full” error message would appear. I looked in Settings and found that over 8 Gigabytes were in use storing nearly 4,000 pictures and videos. She needed to get serious about deleting them!

“I have them backed up on my computer, so it’s OK to delete them from the phone,” she said, “but, I don’t want to delete them all because I like looking at them on the phone. It’s just too much work to decide which to delete and which to keep, so I don’t do it.”

I told her if she used Google Photos, she can delete the photos from the phone, but still see them all using the Google Photos app after the pictures were uploaded to her Google account online. With the Google Photos “Free Up Space” command, all the photos can then be removed with one click. “Let’s do it!” she said.

How to prepare your phone for a trip:

Install Google Photos app on your phone, get it from the App store on iOS or the Play store on Android. It’s free.
- turn on “Backup and Sync” setting
- make sure the Google account listed is correct for where you want your photos stored- make sure the upload size is High quality (free unlimited storage)

Watch the photos being backed up! Just because you see photos in the Google Photos app does not mean they’re in your Google Photos account, it takes time. The app initially views the photos on your phone. Only when you see “Backup Complete” are you safe to delete them from the device. You may need to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot because it can use a lot of data to do the backup.

Verify that you can see your photos in your account online. Go to Photos.Google.com and log in with the same Google account used for the app on your phone. You should see all your pictures there.

Now you can delete the photos. Don’t use the trashcan, that deletes from everywhere. Use the Google Photos app on your phone, tap the 3-line menu, Free Up Space. You will see a message about how many photos will be deleted and how much space will be freed up. If you are using an iPhone, and you have iCloud Photo Library turned on, realize these photos will be removed from all iCloud devices as well.

It took all night for Chris’ 4,000 pictures to be backed up. When we looked in the morning, the Google Photos app reported 110 photos remaining. It just took another half hour or so for those to complete. Using a computer, I had Chris sign in to her Google Photos account to prove that we could see her photos online that had just been backed up from her phone. Yes! All photos were there, so I had her open the Google Photos app, and tap the Free Up Space option. Seconds later, she had over 8 GB of free space, plenty for a few thousand pictures.

Bon Voyage Chris and Charles! I can already see from your Facebook photos that you’re having a good time!

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

“Tag, you’re IT!” That’s what it’s like in today’s world on Facebook. Its called a “Challenge” and the latest one is about Black and White photography.

Seven days, seven black and white photos of your life. No people, no pets, no explanations.

I usually ignore challenges, I’m a party pooper, I don’t want to play. But, I liked this, I wanted to play. Here are my 7 pictures:

#1 Dolphin carving, black and white with vignette

#2 WWII Museum in New Orleans - just black and white with a little Pop

#2 Lighthouse: Vogue filter with a little Pop!

#3 Jackalope

#4 Roadtrek

#5 Union Station Kansas City

#7 Bridge over Missouri river in Kansas City. Also added some "Drama" using Snapseed

I Cheated

I did not use Black and White film! I didn’t set my digital camera to take black and white photos. I didn’t even use my phone’s capability to take photos in black and white mode. I took color pictures. A few of these, like the lighthouse, are even old color pictures I chose, then I used very simple editing tools to create the B&W images.
Here’s the lighthouse photo that I took back in September 2016, it’s in my Google Photos library.
To turn this into a Black and White photo, all I had to do was click to open it, then click the Edit tool: Now I see a number of “filters”, including 3 different black and white filters: Eiffel, Vogue, and Vista. Just try clicking on each one and see what it does. I like the Vogue the best, but then I also add a little Pop to sharpen the lines a bit.
The filter does the trick, but there’s another way I think I like even better. You can click on the Adjustments button: Yes, I know, it looks just like the Edit button above. Don’t ask me why, I liked the old pencil for the edit button personally! Anyway, once you’re in the adjustments, you’ll see a slider for color. If you drag that all the way to the left, you’ll remove all the color … that makes it black and white! Then, you can also add a little “Pop!” If you add more pop, you’ll get some of the color back, but in a special, muted way. Watch this quick video and I'll show you exactly how to do it.

Partial Black and White

If you watch the video, you'll see how Jim made this image of our musician friends, Victor and Penny, performing at Cafe Paradiso in Fairfield, Iowa. Notice how the photo is not completely black and white, but it's not really color either.

Want to give it a try?

Don’t wait for a challenge, just do it. You can post them on Facebook, or you can even leave a link here in the comments where we can see your black and white masterpieces. To get a link:

Saturday, October 7, 2017

We had company over for dinner last night and, invariably, there came a time where they started showing us pictures from their last trip. They opened the photos on their phone, then we would pass the phone around.

Wait a minute!

We can do better than that.

Let's have a real slideshow using the big screen TV. We have a TV with several HDMI ports. In HDMI 2 we have plugged in a Chromecast device. The phone in question is an iPhone. The Chromecast device works just fine with either iPhone or Android. You can purchase them for about $35 at Amazon, or any electronics store like Best Buy.

Here's what you do:

Set the TV source to HDMI2 (whatever port has the Chromecast device plugged in)

Connect the phone to the same WiFi hotspot that the TV/Chromecast is connected to. Our household hotspot is "Geeks Hotspot" When we first installed the Chromecast, we followed the instructions to connect it to that hotspot.I told our friends to go to the WiFi settings on their iPhone and connect to Geeks Hostpot. I gave them the password.

Open Google Photos and open the first photos you want to show, then tap the chromecast button in the upper right.

You should now be seeing that photo on the TV. On an iPhone, you will need to swipe left to see the next photo. On Android, you can tap the 3-dot menu and choose Play Slideshow to have the photos progress automatically.

Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

If you upgraded your iPhone or iPad to iOS 11, you now have a new photo file format called HEIC and a new video file format called HEVC. The HE stands for High Efficiency and it is a new official format developed by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG.) These are the same folks who developed the standard .jpg format so many years ago. This is not, therefore, an Apple thing, but Apple is the first major player to adopt it. The main purpose of the new format is to store the same photo using less file space, but it can also store multiple photos in one file, and multiple layers. I took the 2 pictures below with the same iPhone, the only difference is I changed the setting from the new format, back to the old in between taking the 2 shots. The new format takes up 3.1MB and the old takes 5.1. They both have the same number of pixels - 12.2 MegaPixels.

I can see both file types using Google Photos. The problem is, if I download the .HEIC file to my Windows computer, it can't open it. It just shows up as an outline of a white empty box. And, if I view it in my Android's version of Google Photos, I can see it, but I can't edit it.

Mrs Geek's Advice

If you are using all Apple devices, you're fine. But, if there are any Windows devices in your mix - or if you're sharing some of your Google Photos with others who have non-Apple devices - then you would need to be sure those photos are converted back to the old format.

My advice is to turn back the clock and change your iPhone's setting so that it uses the old format - at least until the other systems catch up.

Settings

Camera

Format

Most Compatible

What Else is New in Google Photos?

Episode #125 of What Does This Button Do explores the new features of Google Photos from the past 6 months. If you get there today (9/23/17) at 2pm Central / 3pm Eastern you can watch while we record the live presentation. Subscribe to the GeeksOnTour YouTube channel and click the little bell icon to get notifications any time we're live.

Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.

Saturday, September 2, 2017

I have a beautiful photo of a waterfall in Pennsylvania. It's in my Google Photos library. I took it with my Canon camera. How can I use it as the wallpaper for my iPhone (or Android) phone?

I can see it on either of my phones, but it doesn't show up when I try to select a photo for wallpaper, because the wallpaper setting is only seeing the pictures that reside on the device. So, I need to get it down from the cloud (my Google Photos account) to the camera roll (or gallery) on the device. There are lots of apps that only work with photos on your device, so even if you don't care about wallpaper, this is a good thing to learn.

Here's how to do it:

Open Google Photos and view the desired photo

tap the 3-dot menu

Android: Save to Device

iPhone: Download

Assuming you have a decent Internet connection, that photo is now on your device and it will show up as an option for Wallpaper.

This is the quick tip in Episode 124 of What Does This Button Do? Check it out to see exactly how it's done. We demonstrate on both iPhone and Android phone.

Android Bonus: Google Photos direct to wallpaper

The purpose of this article is to show how to download a photo from Google Photos online copy to your device. I used the example of setting a wallpaper, but there are lots of other reasons: there are other apps you may use for printing photos, editing photos, making collages and those apps may only work with photos that are on your device.

If wallpaper is your purpose - Android has an easier way! On an Android phone, you can open a photo in Google Photos, tap the 3-dot menu, and then Use As. You will see wallpaper as an option right there. So easy!

Chris Guld is President and Teacher-in-Chief at GeeksOnTour.com. She has been in computer training and support since 1983. She is now a Top Contributor for the Google Photos Forum, owner of the LearnGooglePhotos.com blog, and author of Mrs. Geek's Guide to Google Photos. She loves to teach! If you want to learn, you’ve come to the right place.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

It is difficult to take a good picture while in a moving vehicle. You can’t take the time to properly frame the shot, and when you’re bouncing around you’re bound to get things a little crooked, but – take it anyway! It’s a piece of cake to make that picture better after the fact with just a few clicks using Google Photos editing tools. My husband and I travel all over the country in our RV (see our travel maps here.) He does the driving, so I can snap pictures. I love the memories I have from the pictures snapped thru the window.
Sometimes I’m using my iPhone, sometimes an Android device, and sometimes a “real” camera, my Canon T3i. It doesn’t matter what camera I’m using, all my photos go to the cloud in my Google Photos account. Once they’re there, I can using the edit tools to make them look better.
These edit tools are available on my iPhone, on my Android mobile devices, or on my computer at Photos.Google.com. You open any photo, then click the edit button. Note: the edit button has recently changed on the computer and the Android version, instead of the trusty old pencil icon - - it is now the same as the adjustments ‘slider’ icon - . Either way, it takes you to the editing tools: Filters, Adjustments, and Crop/rotate. Crop and rotate (straighten) is probably the most important tool in the following examples. All of these editing features are detailed in previous articles in this website: